2.06.2008

Ranking Woo

You can get an interesting glimpse of the online culture through the search terms entered most often in search engines like Google. Google's Zeitgeist is a fascinating comprehensive look at what we've been searching on during the past month, and their year end review gives a nice retrospective glance over our shoulder. In case you're wondering, for 2007 the fastest rising search term had to do with a little thing called the iPhone. Heard of it?

But maybe you want to know what people are entering in to those search engines right now. Enter Google Trends. Updated hourly (if not sooner), this is a great resource if you care to follow the herd. "Blooter" and "Juicy Campus" happen to be the hot topics as I write. I actually started a blog last year, posting about anything that was ranked among the top 20 hottest trends. I got a lot of drive by visitors, but I'm dubious about using this as a strategy to make money online. For one, it was a LOT of work and, given the random nature of the blog, the was no visitor loyalty. And the trends are fleeting, so by the time the post was uploaded, that particular search term had cooled.

Keyword Discovery provides quantitative data on search terms which can be used to generate a rank order of the terms. Naturally, I fed their query tool some words of woo, along with a few others for reference, to generate the following list.

sex....................6,085,197monster..................433,893jesus....................323,508fairies..................218,774ghost....................195,603ufo......................180,195fairy....................179,978 science..................164,595god......................132,234astrology................115,083religion.................114,050tarot....................111,429alien....................101,026supernatural..............91,579bigfoot...................72,724evolution.................61,133spirit....................59,711psychic...................42,012paranormal................29,485chiropractic..............29,425Sylvia Browne.............28,397esp.......................26,737Kevin Trudeau.............21,203crop circles..............18,728alternative medicine......15,477aura......................15,466reason....................14,777mystic....................14,232stock market predictions..13,110creation..................12,813intelligent design........12,761conspiracy................12,459atheist...................11,937logic.....................11,465new age...................10,556homeopathy.................8,512astral.....................7,996metaphysics................7,764Randi......................7,701afterlife..................5,610woo........................4,687parapsychology.............3,978clairvoyance...............3,477alien abduction............3,288Uri Geller.................2,682pseudoscience..............2,060logical fallacy............1,937skepticism.................1,806quack......................1,452debunk.......................353Skepticism falls at the bottom of the list, but "evolution" trounces "intelligent design", "science" reigns over "religion", and "Randi" defeats "Uri Geller" in yet another domain. However, I can't form more than a passing judgment on these results. For one, I really don't know what the latency of this data is nor do I know the details of how it is gathered. I presume that a lot of this is driven by news stories and top TV programs - basically whatever happens to tickle our culture right now. Then again, order of magnitude differences are telling. That "psychic" far outranks "skeptic" (which is even lower than "skepticism") indicates that skepticism has yet to make it into the big time. Watching this list over time should provide an indication of how the "market" is being penetrated and by whom.

As for me, I just want to see "woo" climb the ladder, even if I have to enlist the help of one Kwon Sang Woo to make it happen. Whatever it takes. Eyes on the prize, baby.